Reviews of unreproducible packages
43 package reviews have been added, 4 have been updated and 12 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.
2 issue types have been updated:

debrebuild development
debrebuild is new tool proposed by HW42 and josch (see #774415: "From srebuild sbuild-wrapper to debrebuild").
debrepatch development
debrepatch is a
set of scripts that we're currently developing to make it easier to track
unapplied patches. We have a lot of those and we're not always sure if they still
work. The plan is to set up jobs to automatically apply old reproducibility
patches to newer versions of packages and notify the right people if they
don't apply and/or no longer make the package reproducible.
debpatch
is a component of debrepatch that applies debdiffs to Debian source packages.
In other words, it is to debdiff(1) what patch(1) is to diff(1). It is a
general tool that is not specific to Reproducible Builds. This week, Ximin Luo
worked on making it more "production-ready" and will soon submit it for
inclusion in devscripts.
reprotest development
Ximin Luo significantly improved reprotest, adding presets and auto-detection
of which preset to use. One can now run e.g. reprotest auto . or reprotest
auto $pkg_$ver.dsc instead of the long command lines that were needed before.
He also made it easier to set up build dependencies inside the virtual server
and made it possible to specify pre-build dependencies that reprotest itself
needs to set up the variations. Previously one had to manually edit the virtual
server to do that, which was not very usable to humans without an in-depth
knowledge of the building process.
These changes will be tested some more and then released in the near future as
reprotest 0.4.

Holger also setup two new i386 builders, build12+16, for >50% increased build performance. For this, we went from 18+17 cores on two 48GB machines to 10+10+9+9 cores on four 36GB ram machines and from 16 to 24 builder jobs. Thanks to Profitbricks for providing us with all these ressources once more!

h01ger also tried to enable disorderfs again, but hit #844498, which brought down the i386 builders, so he disabled it again. Next will be trying disorderfs on armhf or amd64, to see whether this bug also manifests there.

Misc.
This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Ximin Luo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

20 September 2016

What happened in the Reproducible
Builds effort between Sunday
September 11 and Saturday September 17 2016:
Toolchain developments
Ximin Luo started a new series of tools called (for now)
debrepatch, to
make it easier to automate checks that our old patches to Debian packages still
apply to newer versions of those packages, and still make these reproducible.
Ximin Luo updated one of our few remaining patches for dpkg in #787980
to make it cleaner and more minimal.
The following tools were fixed to produce reproducible output:

The following 3 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to
changes in their build-dependencies: jaxrs-apipython-luazope-mysqlda.
Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

Reviews of unreproducible packages
462 package reviews have been added, 524 have been updated and 166 have been removed in this week,
adding to our knowledge about identified issues.
25 issue types have been updated:

Added a new annotation for issues called "fix-deterministic" to help us
update package reviews more easily. This indicates whether we expect that an
issue would always happen on Jenkins; i.e. if there is a successful build,
then we know the issue is fixed for that package and can update our notes.

diffoscope development
A new version of diffoscope 60 was
uploaded to unstable by Mattia
Rizzolo. It included
contributions
from:

Mattia Rizzolo:

Various packaging and testing improvements.

HW42:

minor wording fixes

Reiner Herrmann:

minor wording fixes

It also included from changes previous weeks; see either the changes or commits
linked above, or previous blog posts 727170.
strip-nondeterminism development
New versions of strip-nondeterminism 0.027-1 and 0.028-1 were uploaded to
unstable by Chris Lamb. It included
contributions
from:

Chris Lamb:

Testing improvements, including better handling of timezones.

disorderfs development
A new version of disorderfs 0.5.1 was
uploaded to unstable by Chris
Lamb. It included
contributions
from:

Andrew Ayer and Chris Lamb:

Support relative paths for ROOTDIR; it no longer needs to be an absolute path.

Chris Lamb:

Print the behaviour (shuffle/reverse/sort) on startup to stdout.

It also included from changes previous weeks; see either the changes or commits
linked above, or previous blog posts 70.
Misc.
This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and reviewed by a bunch of
Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.